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Video Job Postings

Video Job Postings

Whether your business is located in Atlanta, London, Toronto, Chicago, Singapore or Sydney, its job search customers are probably increasingly captivated by visual content and reliant on search engines to find it. How can your employment site leverage these dynamics to improve its bottom line? One way might be to promote the use of video-based job postings.

Video job postings do not replace traditional text-based ads, but they can be an important additional product for you to offer for at least two reasons. First, the medium, itself, is compelling. Whether it’s on CNN or YouTube or a thousand other sites, online videos are now watched, reposted and discussed by Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials alike. Second, the medium stands out on the Web. The algorithms of Google, Bing and other search engines give videos strong scores which translate into higher search engine rankings for their content.

Video job postings, like their text-based cousins, must follow the Golden Rule of Recruitment Advertising: What you do to recruit top talent will also recruit mediocre talent, but the converse is not true. In other words, the key to creating an effective video ad is to design it for the most discerning, most challenging audience: passive, high caliber performers who are already employed and reluctant to make a change. If your employer customers get it right for that population, and they’ll get it right for everyone else.

To accomplish that goal, employers must first understand some of the key defining attributes of top talent. They:

have the attention span of a gnat, so must be captured quickly;

don’t see themselves as job seekers, so dislike the vocabulary of job searching;

listened to their mother, so won’t speak to strangers but will listen to their peers.

Collectively, these attributes establish the optimum format and content for a video job posting. Let’s look at each of them in a bit more detail.

Top Talent have the attention span of a gnat, so must be captured quickly.

They won’t sit still for an ad that runs on and on. The optimum length for a video job posting, therefore, is at least three minutes – to ensure the employer provides enough information to engage them – but no more than five minutes – to prevent them from bailing out in boredom.

Top Talent don’t see themselves as job seekers, so dislike the vocabulary of job searching.

The best talent think traditional job searching terms like “requirements” and “responsibilities” are words only an employer could love. As they see it, that’s information employers want them to know, not the insights they want to uncover about an opportunity. Therefore, employers should take the individual’s perspective in framing their video ad and tell those individuals “what’s in it for them.”

Top Talent listened to their mother, so won’t speak to strangers, but will listen to their peers.

The first factor top talent consider when evaluating an employment opportunity is the nature of the work experience. They want to know what it will be like to work in their field in the organization. For that reason, they accord more credibility to and place more trust in video ads that feature their peers and those who would be their direct supervisor rather than traditional organizational spokespeople like the CEO and recruiters.

Text-based recruitment ads will continue to be an important recruiting tool, but video job postings can have an emotional impact that is very hard to achieve with the written word. Designed as a trailer for an employment opportunity and tailored to the unique attributes of top talent, they can be especially effective in moving passive prospects to an active and engaged state. And that’s exactly where your employer customers need them to be to recruit them.

2015 User’s Choice Awards Winners

The User’s Choice Awards are the only accolade in the online employment services industry where the winners are picked by actual users. Forget the opinions of self-appointed pundits, in this program, job seekers and recruiters determine which job boards and other employment sites are the elite of the industry.

As with All Star balloting in major league baseball, the selection process is not a scientific survey. It is, however, a measure of the strength of support that sites generate among their customers. A polling station is open all year long at Weddles.com, and the thirty sites with the most votes at the end of the year are crowned the User’s Choice Award winners for that year.

Any employment site may ask to be included on the ballot. Those that aren’t IAEWS Members simply complete a questionnaire that confirms their operation in the online employment services industry. If you would like to have your site or sites added to the ballot for the 2016 Awards, please contact Peter Weddle at peter@weddles.com.

The 2015 User’s Choice Award winners are:

AllCountyJobs.com

AllRetailJobs.com

America’s Job Exchange

ASAE Career HQ (American Society of Association Executives)

Beyond.com

CareerBuilder.com

CollegeRecruiter.com

CoolWorks.com

Dice.com

DiversityJobs.com

EHSCareers.com

HERCJobs.org

HigherEdJobs.com

HRJobs.com (Society for Human Resource Management)

IEEE Job Site

iHire.com

Indeed.com

Jobs2Careers.com

JobsinLogistics.com

JobsinTrucks.com

MilitaryConnection.com

MilitaryHire.com

Monster.com

National Healthcare Career Network

RetirementJobs.com

SimplyHired.com

SnagAJob.com

VetJobs.com

Workopolis

ZipRecruiter.com

Are You or Your Company an Employment Services Innovator?

The Recruiting Service Innovation Awards area all new and all about you!

That’s right, the ReSIs have expanded the competition to recognize:

Talent acquisition providers (sites, apps and solutions)

and

Talent acquisition partners

as well as

the individuals who work for those organizations

and

the products and services they provide to their customers.

In short, we’ll now be celebrating both the Innovators and the Innovations in the online employment services industry.

The awards will recognize the Innovator of the Year for the following organizations AND the individuals who work for them:

Niche employment sites

General purpose employment sites

Association career centers

Digital media companies (e.g., the job board on a newspaper or magazine site)

Mobile apps

Cloud based solutions

Social media companies

Analytics & Big Data companies

A ReSI will also be presented to the Innovator of the Year among job board partners in each of the following categories:

Start-up company (operating for one year or less)

Small company (operating for more than one year and with up to 50 employees)

Mid-to Large company (operating for more than one year and with 51+ employees)

And last but not least, ReSIs will be awarded to products and services that represent Innovations of the Year as the:

Most Innovative SMB Solution

Most Innovative Social Recruiting Solution

Most Innovative Recruitment Advertising Solution

Most Innovative Mobile Solution

Most Innovative Cloud-Based Solution

The Most Innovative Big Data Solution

The ReSIs competition is open to all employment-related organizations worldwide. For more information on the ReSIs themselves and the nominating process, please click here.

2015 IAEWS Spring Congress

The registration portal for the IAEWS Spring Congress is now open. Click here to make your discount registrations before they expire and to book your discount hotel rooms before they sell out.

The theme of the Spring Congress is “optimizing the recruiter’s experience”. As always it will offer speakers you won’t hear anywhere else, insights you can’t acquire anywhere else, and peer interactions that are one-of-a-kind.

The Congress will be held on April 25-26, 2014 in San Diego, California, just prior to and collocated with the SHRM Talent Management Conference & Expo. That means in just one trip, you can attend both the premier conference for your industry AND the premier conference for your customers. That’s making every penny, pound and euro count!

The IAEWS Spring Congress is open to all employment-related organizations worldwide that offer products and services to employers and recruiters. So, don’t delay, click here to reach the IAEWS registration portal.

Private Research Bulletin

It’s tough to keep track of what’s happening in the online employment services industry. Companies are being bought and sold, new technology and services are being introduced, partnerships and alliances are being formed, and alternative business models and strategies are being tested and promoted. All of the time.

Staying on top of it all is critical to bottom line success. But who has the time to collect and read what’s published at the multiple channels that report on such matters? And equally as important, who wants to read everything when only a subset of the information is likely to impact your business?

WEDDLE’s Research Bulletin – a private, monthly e-report – solves these problems. It uses a wide range of sources – both inside and outside the industry – to capture the latest news relevant to online employment and then curates that information to deliver what’s most important with commentary about why and what it could mean.

The WEDDLE’s Research Bulletin is a for-fee publication that gives you your own in-house research and analysis arm. It focuses exclusively on the online employment services industry and delivers exactly what you need to know in just four easy-to-digest pages.

For more information about the Bulletin and its cost, please contact Peter Weddle at peter@weddles.com.